Manjusha Nair

Manjusha Nair is currently and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She completed her PhD in 2011 from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She also has a Master of Philosophy in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Her research interests are in Political Sociology, Development, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Labor Movements, State and Society in China and India. She does research on state and social conflict, globalization and development, and the politics of the non-elite. Manjusha Nair is currently preparing a book manuscript titled “Labor in Transition: Informal Workers, State and the Business Elite in Central India, 1977-2012” that addresses the transformations in citizenship through a comparative study of two labor movements in central India. Through careful ethnographic analysis, she points to the rising power of the local state and the business groups in post-neoliberal India, and the lessened ability of the citizens to hold them accountable. Manjusha is also working on a comparative project on globalization and state capacity in China and India. First part of it examines the Chinese and Indian state policies that entitle people to have rights as “the poor” and not as citizens. The second part of it examines the classic question of state’s relations to the peasants by looking at the management of rural governance in China and India..